Camp For Tramps: Part Three

For the last two days, I've been telling about my first camping trip in a long while. Where I just left off, we were through for the day after a long post-dinner conversation. At bedtime, four of us went into the big tent, with myself and one other going into the small one. I found it to be adequately spacious, but cannot speak for the large tent. I heard no complaints except to say that it could only with difficulty accept any more people. Of course, like little boys on their first campout, we talked for a while longer between the tents while in our sleeping bags, but there got to be longer pauses in between witticisms expressed by fewer and fewer people. I slept not so badly, although I found I was not any better disposed towards sleeping on hard, cold ground than I had been as a boy. Not helping matters was that I was less well equipped than in those days. I would have loved to have at my disposal half of the things I know are sitting around in my family's garage.

The following morning we had our breakfast of juice, bananas and cereal bars. There was some conflict centering on those bars, which seemed to be in shorter supply than anticipated. Some had been eaten the day before, but this did not account fully for the discrepancy. I realized after a fashion that I had pocketed a bar, forgotten about it, then pocketed another. The surprise appearance of two more bars was a welcome salve. We got in one more rather unstructured hike that morning, but the real point of interest was a comical burrowing rodent which was at the time repeatedly called a mole, but which I'm certain was in fact a gopher. We watched for a long time as he would appear through a hole, cover the hole up, then appear in another hole and repeat the process. I don't know that we saw him make a hole. They were everywhere. The whole thing was rather amusing.

Camp For Tramps: Part Two

Yesterday, I started to tell of my first camping trip in years. Where I left off, we had just bought our supplies, and were headed to the campsite. From there, it was off to Malibu Creek Canyon State Park. We opted for the lovely and scenic but not terribly practical Pacific Coast Highway. It works once one gets to it through a variety of surface streets, but the homely 101 would have gotten us there faster. We would take it home at the end of the trip. We got to the park and found a reasonable if congested campground. Others voiced disappointment, expecting apparently that we would be more remote and enjoy greater privacy. I might have told them that one only gets that at the end of a long hike. Campsites one drives to are often little better than RV parks. This one was pretty good by comparison, heavily populated and trafficked though it was. I could have done without the high proportion of paved surface.

Fairly soon after we got situated, it was off for some hiking. We came up with a plan to see the site where the show 'MASH' was filmed, and got a basic idea of what trail would get us there. A stop at the visitors center and the acquisition there of a map helped. Evidently we were perhaps not entirely welcome in the eyes of the center's staff of two, who it seems were soon to close up and hoped to get a jump on the process. The arrival of our group's six members put a damper on that. They offered us little reason to stay after getting that map. We speculated various lurid reasons why they sought to keep the center free of any members of the public. Oddly, when they advised us that water bottles could be filled outside, they called the device a 'stanchion', as opposed to a faucet. I gather there must be some significance to the distinction.

Camp For Tramps: Part One

It comes up from time to time that I was an Eagle Scout, and while the line of discussion usually ends on the significance of that achievement, it sometimes goes on to touch on the things I did to get it. Other Eagle Scouts usually want to know about the service project I carried out to cap off the whole thing. Others, often not Scouts themselves, joke about 'being prepared'. What seldom comes up is what I believe I spent the most time doing, which is hiking and camping. I tell plenty of stories about both on my own initiative, but have done little of either in the last six years. 2004 was the last summer I worked at a Boy Scout Camp. Several years before that, I had became basically inactive in my troop upon my eighteenth birthday. Lately I've been mostly confined to sleeping in my own bed and walking on city streets. That changed recently.

For the first time in a good long while, I went camping. The reason was that a good friend was getting married, and chose a chaste, sober camping trip for his bachelor party over the more traditional weekend of debauchery. That was just fine by me, although I would not have raised hell if a mere six pack had joined us on our trip to be shared by the group. As the weekend drew near, I gave some thought to the disruption to life that a weekend away from town would present. Of course, that was no obstacle, and points more to my difficulties in focusing on a single task than on being loathe to abandon the luxuries of home. I did regret having to make my fantasy football roster that much earlier, but that was a small matter. The whole thing looked to be really very good for me.